Category Archives: repotting

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I got myself a coffee table for the balcony which I can also use for re-potting and other jobs like that.

Coffee/ Re-potting Table

One of my co-workers wants some of the seedlings (stone pine and ginkgo so far), so I prepared them for her. I got some bonsai soil, too, because she wants to give it a try and I will need it anyway. The pine seedling on the photograph is the one from the video.

One of the Granny Smith’s Apple seedlings came out nice after the first pruning, so I’m keeping it as well.

I had actually planned on sowing rapini (broccoli raab) – I had ordered some seeds and they had arrived yesterday – but the sowing period is July to September. What a disappointment.

Firstly, I might have to mention that I work for an on-line shop that sells Italian delicatessen, wine and food stuff in general to people in Germany and Austria.

Today, we tasted new cheese products (ricotta, provolone, caciocavallo) and the fresh ricotta came in a pot that I immediately called, because it looked like a net pot planter and it was rather small (6 cm in diameter, as you can see in the photograph).

Net pot planter from recycled cheese pot

I’m happy to announce that we will sell this ricotta soon, because this means that the supply is quite secured. Everybody loved the fresh ricotta, so I can ask my co-workers to save the pots for me, if they buy it. I will buy some too, especially now that I know I can recycle the pots. Net pot planters in that size are difficult to come by and they’re supposedly helpful for bonsais to get their roots growing.

Yesterday, I got one of the medlar fruits from their stratification container on my balcony, because it is too warm during daytime anyway to call it stratification. I put the seeds into water overnight and sowed them today.

I also gave the ginkgo seeds from the egg carton pots proper pots, because the egg carton had started to rot and I was a bit concerned about my health. And I put the date seed that had germinated in vermiculite into a proper pot with proper soil. (Sorry for labelling the medlar seeds as “quince”, I had forgotten the name in English.) I only cut the egg carton “compartments” apart and put them into the new pots with the soil and the seeds.

medlar, date and ginkgo pots

Then I prepared a little something for my co-worker from Sicily. He had shown interest in the lemon seedlings, so I’m giving him one and one of the two pine seedlings. They’re his favourite tree.

I encountered a bit of a snag when I entered the source code into the Raspberry Pi command console: I wanted to take pictures for 40 days, but apparently somewhere between 21 and 28 days, there’s a limit. So I settled for 21 days. However, I have already made a note in my calender 21 days from now to restart the sequence. A picture will be taken every 2 hours.

I have to say that I am disappointed in the bio-degradsable pots I used for some of my seedlings. The soil is always drier than in the plastic pots which means more watering and at the same time the pots are always moist and have started to mould.

Moulding bio-degradable pots

I had anticipated that, because they are bio-degradable after all. Some of the lemon trees, like the one in the picture, still seem to need more water. I put most of them into plastic pots now without removing the bio-degradable ones. Unfortunately, I have run out of plastic pots. I checked Ebay for small ones, but decided for 15 clay pots, which only have a diameter of 4 cm, but they’re more environmentally friendly than the plastic ones, I guess.

I suppose the bio-degradable pots are okay for getting vegetable seeds to germinate (like pepper or tomatoes), but not for keeping seedlings inside for a longer period of time. Maybe, to long-time gardeners, that was obvious from the start, but I want to give everything a try and make the experience myself.

I just realized today that I used the wrong word when I wrote about singling out the lemon seedlings during the weekend. I wrote re-potting which wasn’t quite correct. Sorry, my gardening English is developing the same speed my plants are. I hope I got it right now. Anyway, they actually moved to new pots…

Bio-degradable pots

Singling Out Seedlings

Lemon Seedling with roots

So, I got my bio-degradable pots today – 2o of them – and new soil. So I singled more lemon seedlings. I came across this nice example with some side roots, which I want to share. The others mainly had the one vertical root – I’m sure there is a special name for that too – and only rarely one more horizontal root. This one, however, had four or five horizontal roots. Good boy! (Or girl, or both…)

Bio-degradable Pots

I like those bio-degradable pots. For one, they’re not made from plastic and their colour is kind of earthy and warm. The black plastic pots might have the advantage of turning the sunlight into warmth better and even storing that warmth a bit. The greatest advantage of the bio-degradable pots might as well be their greatest disadvantage: They’re bio-degradable! Who would have thought?! No, seriously, you don’t need to remove them for re-potting, they will degrade in the next pot. I’m just afraid that they will start degrading before their time because of the watering…For me, another advantage though is their size. Because they’re slightly smaller than the plastic pots, I can get more of them into the platter (is that the right word? the green bottom of my mini greenhouses).

Anyway, I will keep the plastic pots, in case I want to give the seedlings away next summer. I have way too many.